In the hi-fi business, the company names that are the most famous are often those that are named after the person who founded them. And in all cases, that person is either a talented engineer, a visionary or a gifted marketer — or sometimes all three. Let me compile a brief inventory of famous hi-fi company founders off the top of my head for you: Paul Klipsch, Saul Marantz, James Bullough Lansing, David A. Wilson, Ray Dolby, Frank McIntosh, Mark Levinson, Nelson Pass, Harold Leak, Dan D’Agostino, Hermann Thorens, Peter Lyngdorf, and Torakusu Yamaha, to name but a few.
There have been quite a few famous hi-fi partnerships as well, such as John Bowers and Roy Wilkins (B&W), Camillo Bang and Svend Olufsen (B&O), Sidney Harman and Bernard Kardon (harman/kardon), and Gayle Martin Sanders and Ron Logan Sutherland (who very sensibly used their middle names, rather than their family names).
But there have been very, very few instances where a person who worked for a company has become as famous as the person who founded it. However this was certainly the case when it comes to the late Ken Ishiwata, who worked for Marantz for nearly half a century and, although he had a business card that said ‘Brand Ambassador’ was actually the face of Marantz for so many in the hi-fi world that the names ‘Ishiwata’ and ‘Marantz’ were synonymous. So synonymous that many of Marantz’s products
